Re: Documenting methods for which there is no source

Sam Roberts wrote:

>The most annoying thing I find with the RSS encoder is failures seem to
>return nil. No exception, no error message, you call a method, get nil
>back, and then have to start reading the code, and thats not so easy
>because many of the methods don't actually exist in text form, they are
>created on the fly.
>  
>

Well, I have to say that having spent some hours working my way through 
it, I don't like the RSS library as a decoder of RSS. It seems to be a 
literal translation of the standards into code, rather than something 
designed to be easy and convenient to use. As a result, you need to know 
what kind of RSS feed you're parsing, because the API for accessing the 
parsed objects is different depending on the input format--your code may 
work fine for RSS2.0, and then fall over with a nil when fed RSS1.0 by 
the next feed.

I had a look on the web for other Ruby RSS implementations, and based on 
what I found I'm assuming this one got chosen for the standard library 
because it was the first one to implement at least three major flavors 
of RSS, i.e. the first to be fairly complete. I was kinda hoping it was 
better as an encoder.

I try to avoid wheel-reinvention, but this particular wheel is just 
begging for it...

mathew